From Picard to Professor X: Sir Patrick Stewart remembered

Flowers are being laid on Sir Patrick Stewart's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, following his death at age 86.

Stewart became an accomplished Shakespearean stage actor, but to many he will be remembered for his work on TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men movies.

The British actor's final film role was in Avengers: Doomsday, due out in December.

"We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today," Hugh Jackman, a frequent Stewart co-star in the X-Men universe, said on social media.

"And, in my book, a tremendous friend and man. I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days."

'Make it so'

Stewart became an actor at age 18, and continued performing well into his 80s.

He gained acclaim on stage as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, before making his debut on TV in 1967 playing a fireman in Coronation Street.

Mainstream fame found Stewart later in life when, at age 47, he landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation — a TV series that ran from 1987 to 1994 as a sequel to the original 1960s Star Trek.

"Make it so," his character Picard often said, or sometimes deploying the similar catchphrase, "Engage."

He donned the now iconic costume for 176 episodes over seven seasons, and in numerous Star Trek films.

He later returned for series Star Trek: Picard, which aired in 2020 when he was 79.

"As the seven seasons of TNG (The Next Generation) went by, the distinction between Jean-Luc Picard and Patrick Stewart became thinner and thinner, until it was impossible for me to know where he left off and I began," Stewart told the Guardian newspaper in 2022.

"So much of what I believed and felt went into that show".

The official Star Trek social media account paid tribute on Instagram.

"A voice. A presence. A captain unlike any other," the account said.

"Sir Patrick Stewart gave generations of fans an icon who inspired us to look toward the stars. Today, we celebrate an extraordinary life and an enduring legacy."

'Extraordinary grace, intelligence and humanity'

Stewart found further acclaim — and a new generation of fans — on the big screen in the X-Men series as Professor Charles Xavier, the founder and mentor of the mutant superhero team.

He debuted as Professor X alongside Sir Ian McKellan and Hugh Jackman in the original X-Men trilogy from 2000 to 2006.

He returned for four more films, with what was originally his final outing as Professor X in 2017's Logan.

Stewart reappeared for a surprise cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, and reprised the role in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

"Sir Patrick brought Professor Charles Xavier to life with extraordinary grace, intelligence, and humanity, defining the character for generations of fans, from X-Men to Logan to Avengers: Doomsday," Marvel Studios said.

Starship commander grew up with no indoor toilet

Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in the town of Mirfield in Yorkshire, in the north of England.

The family home had an outdoor toilet.

His father, back from World War II and perhaps suffering from PTSD, would often beat Stewart's mother, which prompted the actor to later work with the charity Refuge, which specialises in domestic abuse.

"More women and children, just like my mother and me, will continue to experience abuse unless we all speak out against it," he said.

As a child, Stewart said, acting became a "safe space" after a schoolteacher introduced him to Shakespeare — specifically The Merchant of Venice — during a class when he was 12.

He started losing his hair at age 17 and was bald by 19, with alopecia running in his family. He was embarrassed at the time, but eventually embraced it.

Shakespeare 'feels like a friend'

Stewart joined an amateur drama group at 12 and memorised Shakespeare for fun as a teen.

He won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, launching a career as a character actor.

Stewart was accepted into the Royal Shakespeare Company and stayed for 14 years, playing everything from Mark Antony to Henry IV, Shylock and Oberon.

"People who were not in the company would say to me, 'Give it a break. Why don't you go somewhere else?' And I would say, 'To do what?'" he told the Associated Press.

"Telly?"

Stewart eventually left to look for more varied work, including the 1981 film Excalibur.

He had just done a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1987 when an interesting offer came along.

"I found myself in Hollywood shooting a syndicated science fiction series, which I was assured would fail" he wrote in his memoir, Making It So.

It didn't.

Thanks to Stewart's rich baritone and noble bearing, the Star Trek franchise ran for seven years.

His love of Shakespeare would serve him well when he began to play Jean-Luc Picard.

"There is a formality to the way they speak and comport themselves that remind me of numerous Shakespearean situations I'd been in onstage. I should play Jean Luc, I realised, as if he were a character in Henry IV, which is about brave men," Stewart wrote in his memoir.

He won two Olivier awards, one for his performance in Antony and Cleopatra in 1979 and another for his role as Claudius in Hamlet in 2009, opposite David Tennant.

Stewart was also nominated three times for a Grammy Award, winning once in 1996 for his narration of Prokofiev: Peter And The Wolf.

Shakespeare, Stewart said, "feels like a friend, someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine".

In a tribute, The Royal Shakespeare Company called him: "A colossus of both stage and screen and one of the finest classical Shakespearean actors of his generation."

ABC/wires